Parents to Blame for Your Poor Love Life?

09-07-2014

Are you having problems with intimate relationships? A new study says your challenges might be directly related to a poor relationship with your parents during your adolescent years.

A team of researchers joined University of Alberta associate professor Matt Johnson to survey 2,970 people at three different stages in their lives. They discovered that positive adolescent-parent relationships improve one's chances of having higher quality intimate relationships as adults.

But this doesn't mean that parents are completely to blame for their children's poor love lives, Johnson told The Huffington Post.

"People tend to compartmentalize their relationships; they tend not to see the connection between one kind, such as family relations, and another, like couple unions. But understanding your contribution to the relationship with your parents would be important to recognizing any tendency to replicate behavior - positive or negative -- in an intimate relationship," Johnson said.

The study further concluded that parental relationships that fostered high self-esteem equated to more successful adult romantic relationships.

"Higher parent-adolescent relations predicted higher self-esteem over the college years, which was then linked with better intimate relations as a young adult," Johnson told the Post.

However, this doesn't mean all hope is lost for those who lacked quality relationships with their parents.

"Individuals with a particularly rocky relationship with their parents during adolescence are not destined to a poorer quality intimate relationship as young adults," the study said. "Instead, a low-quality parent-adolescent relationship is associated with slightly reduced success in an intimate relationship."

Researchers suggested individuals simply identify past negative behavior patterns and make conscious efforts not to replicate them in current and future relationships.